Yes, but the loophole I was mentioning allows companies to not release the code even when it’s GPL, that’s why I was mentioning the AGPL (which is different from the LGPL).

I think many hobby developers also see “hobby” developing as part of their career, so they would happily try and have their hobby align with future employment possibilities. Since companies avoid GPL, those devs will rather choose a license that is more attractive to those potential employers when they see their portfolio.

Thunar is a much better alternative, in my opinion.

To me, the problem is not really so much about “locking people in” (it’s also unclear what you mean by that, if they were already using that ecosystem before using uutils aren’t they already locked in?)

To me, the problem is how the MIT removes legal protections when it comes to ensuring accountability to changes in the source… how can I be sure that the version of uutils shipped with “X Corp OS” has not had some special sauce added-in for increased tracking, AI magic, backdoor or “security” reasons? They are perfectly free to make changes without any public audit or having to tell their users what their own machine is doing anymore.

If you are using a GPL library that is statically linked to code with a different license the result is one binary that has inside both GPL and other license code, which would not be allowed under the GPL terms, because it requires that the binaries that use the source code must have their source code available in full (including other source and modifications that are part of the same binary).

The only case in which you don’t need to provide the source for GPL software is if you don’t actually distribute the binary to customers… private binaries do not have to be published with their source, as long as you never made the binaries public and never gave it to anyone else. Only when you give it to someone you need to provide the code.

This allows for a loophole in which if you are providing a service, then you can run the software privately in your private server without sharing the source code to the clients using the service, since they do not really run the server program although they indirectly benefit from its results. This is why the AGPL was created, since it has a clause to force also those offering services to make the source of the server available to the users of the service.

Yes. Did I deny that?

Can anyone confirm or deny if what I said is wrong?

I get downvoted for stating one advantage an AGPL fork would have, and yet nobody seems to be disagreeing with what I said… *shrugs* 🤷

But, whichever command I put in autostart.sh will run as if I run in terminal with the & sign. E.g: dunst & to run in the background.

Well, only if it’s one single command, if you have multiple commands inside of the script, they will still run sequentially (the next command will only run after the previous one completely closes) unless you add & to them as well.

The difference is that dwm itself will not have to wait for the autostart.sh to complete before launching itself (thanks to it being run in the background with &)

However, autostart_blocking.sh (which isn’t run with a &) will stop dwm from fully launching until the script completes… I guess this is useful if you need certain things to be set up before dwm actually starts… but it would potentially add a delay on dwm startup.

Personally, I don’t think the problem is the risk of companies not contributing back… I honestly wouldn’t mind if they don’t contribute at all and instead they just use the community-developed GPL software as-is, without making any changes to it.

In my mind, the problem is that I cannot trust that a piece of non-copyleft software that’s provided by a company actually does what I expect it should do, and does not have extra bits doing things I do not want it to do. Like the changes Google does in their Chrome version of Chromium, for example. It’s much harder for me to trust any random Chromium fork than it would be a GPL licensed browser, because all Chromium forks can legally include changes without disclosing them openly, they don’t even have to let you know if the binary actually matches the code.

If, for example, MacOS / Microsoft Windows include a copy of OpenSSL with the OS, how can I be sure they are not adding their own sort of malicious spice into it? Can I trust that the keys generated with it will be truly secure? How can I audit it?

At least with the GPL there’s some level of legal accountability in that any change that is not openly shared would be illegal. But with MIT there are no legal barriers against malicious code, it’s totally legal for companies to force feed me totally legal changes that I wouldn’t want and/or that I might not even notice they are there.

developers should be able to license code that they write under whatever license they like

What if they choose a license that limits the freedom from all other developers to improve that copy of the software? is allowing a developer to restrict further development actually good for the freedom of the developers? Because I would say no.

The spirit of the GPL is to give freedom to the developers and hackers (in the good sense of hacker). The chorus of the Free Software Song by Stallman is “you’ll be free hackers, you’ll be free”.

the GPL restricts freedom without adding any that MIT does not also provide

“Your freedom ends when the freedom of others begins”

The only “freedom” the GPL restricts is the freedom to limit the freedom of other developers/hackers that want to edit the software you distribute. This is in the same spirit as having laws against slavery that restrict the “freedom” of people to take slaves.

Would a society that allows oppression (that has no laws against it) be more “free” than a society that does not allow oppression (with laws to guarantee the freedom of others is respected)?

It doesn’t even say “you should use the GPL”

That sounds a lot more confrontational and less diplomatic.

The ticket was actually indirectly asking it, by explaining the potential problems with non-copyleft. They just added “If you plan to carry on…” to introduce a compromise, which actually allowed for at least some minor change to be made, and made it clear that the different license is intentional and not just for lack of awareness (which would imply the devs have no intention on switching).

it says “you MUST say GNU doesn’t agree with you”

Somehow you added the “MUST” to this sentence, but not to the first one… even though the github issue did not say they MUST, instead it even used the word “please” and appealed to having some deference to the GNU coreutils.

At least this issue managed to get a change through for clarity… I don’t think you would have gotten anything at all with the other approach.

Note that AGPL can take changes from MIT but MIT can’t take changes that are purely AGPL without following the AGPL.

So, as far as I can understand, any improvements done to the AGPL version cannot be carried over to the MIT version (without very painful and careful re-implementation / re-engineering). That alone would be a big advantage to the hypothetical AGPL fork.

It would be a bit of a legal nightmare, since it’s theoretically possible that, even without really knowing it, the same feature might be implemented the same way in both forks separately, and the MIT devs might have no sure way to prove they did not copy it. So this would be like walking on eggshells for them.

Thanks. I wasn’t planning to go there anyway…

It’s annoying how the title throws such a general open question and then they don’t clarify this at all… there isn’t even a single match for “USA” or “America” in the whole article, you have to sort of guess.

I don’t think there are many distributions that are truly free, at least not in the eyes of the FSF. Fedora is not one of them.

but for what benefit? […] fedora is going to have off the shelf solutions

Yes, but that’s my point: fedora is already fully featured… the work needed is trivial, to the point that directly using an installation of fedora by itself (along with tools like ansible) wouldn’t be very different from doing he same with EU OS… at that point you don’t need a whole new distro, just Fedora and maybe some trivial scripts (which you are gonna need anyway in any large scale installation, even if you went with EU OS).

Imho, there would be more value if something actually novel was used, and new guides and howtos were created to simplify/clarify things that used to be hard. What would be a pity is to spend a lot of euros for something that is trivial to do, and that only helps filling the pockets of some corrupt politician’s friend. I mean, I’m not against a simple thing, but then I’d hope they at least showed how they will be spending the budget on some other way (marketing? …will there be actual custom software? …are they gonna maintain the entire repo themselves?).

well, the actual software and configuration i’d argue aren’t the important part - owning the infrastructure is the important part…

But I was not arguing against that. And if they did promise to do that, then that would be different. The problem is precisely that I’m expecting them to NOT own most of the infrastructure and instead rely on Fedora repositories, because from experience that’s how these things usually go.

I repeat the full context of the section you quoted: “I guess we’ll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I’m expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme”

Maybe you have a different experience with government-managed distros, but there have been some attempts at that in my (european) country that were definitely not much more than a reskinned Ubuntu (and before that, Debian) from back in the day. They used Ubuntu repositories (ie. Ubuntu infrastructure), and the only extra repo they added was not a mirror, but just hosted a few packages that were actually produced by them and were responsible for the theming, reskining and defaults. They used metapackages that depend on upstream packages to control what was part of the default desktop environment, there might have been a few more extra packages (mainly backports), but very few and always lagging behind alternative backport repos. Uninstall the metapackage (which you might do if you wanna remove some of the preinstalled things) and it literally was Ubuntu straight from Ubuntu official repos. There was no filtering, no veto, no replacing, no mirroring.

Also, just to keep things grounded in the initial point: do you really think that Fedora / Red Hat would not benefit at all from it?

I largely agree, that’s why I was saying that I’m skeptical that all this will amount to anything substantial.

The will for independence exists in the EU, the problem is that the politicians don’t have the balls for it and they would rather push to maintain the status Quo in all the things that matter. Instead they focus on small things that appear good on paper but don’t really amount to anything. See for example the DMA and all it’s promises of forcing big corporations to bend the knee and stopping monopolies… even when a policy like that is written, it is hardly ever properly enforced. Has any company gotten any serious trouble for not implementing GDPR properly since it was introduced?

There has been a will towards more independence for a long time. Trump was just an extra push (and I’m still not convinced even that will be enough… all these initiatives sound good, but past experience has made me skeptical they will really amount to anything substantial).

But I don’t see it necessarily as anti-american. It’s more like we do need to cultivate local products and services more. Europe has for a while been falling behind in a lot of areas, combined with an aging population and an energy crisis, we really need to try and develop internally if we want to keep ourselves afloat, otherwise I’m not sure we can maintain a stable situation.

Yes, although Ctrl-M would be the “Carriage Return” character (\r). For the “Line Feed” newline character (\n) the Control combination would be Ctrl-J. Both of them would normally produce a new line when you press them on most terminals.

That’s why if you open in nano/vim a file with Windows style EOL (/r/n), you might see a strange ^M symbol at the end of each line.

To be more precise, it’s the “EOT” (end of transmission) control character, the 4th symbol in ASCII, from the non-printable character area.

This is true, but then why not base it off Guix (the GNU distro)? …I’m sure Fedora is full of binary blobs and not-so-free software.

If they needed it, they could still add extra software and blobs to Guix, sourced by the EU… and I think doing that would allow it to carve itself a niche (a version of Guix with more compatibility would be interesting for many) rather than sticking a white label on Fedora and call it something else. I don’t see a lot of value on this over just using Fedora directly, I’m not sure if it’s true that Fedora & Red Hat do not benefit from this… wouldn’t their support agents be able to just start providing support also to EU OS customers if they (both customers and support agents) want? Wouldn’t it make it more interesting for private companies working closely with the government to choose Red Hat as a partner when it comes to enterprise Linux?

I guess we’ll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I’m expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme. At most, with some extra software preinstalled. I don’t think that’s a threat to Fedora or Red Hat, but rather an opportunity for expansion.